1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to vehicular traffic flow control. More particularly, this invention relates to automated control of conflicting streams of vehicular traffic flow that flow through a common zone.
2. Description of the Related Art
Worsening road traffic congestion has handicapped the quality of life, especially in and around cities. This has motivated various attempts at automatic traffic control. Traffic intersections and merge areas are examples of conflict zones, in which forward advance of vehicles is often frustrated by other vehicles vying for the same space. Such conflict zones are often bottlenecks in traffic flow.
Existing traffic control and sequencing devices, for example traffic lights, do not allow maximum traffic flow through conflict zones, due in part to latencies when changing directions of flow.
It has been suggested that the introduction of computers into vehicles and infrastructure to facilitate traffic flow may help overcome woefully slow response time of humans, but is not intended to replace superior capability of humans to perform complex situation analysis and to make moral judgments.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2004/0260455 proposes a traffic spacing system intended to prevent bunching of traffic at low speeds in traffic congestion zones. In one version, an acceleration limiting reception device is placed in vehicles and activated in a congestion zone so as to limit non-negative acceleration of the vehicles.